


Cerulean Orbs

by PanzerCrappitista



Category: Critical Role, Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Friendship/Love, Widojest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 09:59:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17262179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanzerCrappitista/pseuds/PanzerCrappitista
Summary: Jester works through her feelings about Caleb and The Mighty Nein through her nightly journaling to The Traveller.





	Cerulean Orbs

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to ukulele_villian for being my beta reader and also a generally wonderful person.  
> 

_ “Caleb Widogast has blue eyes _ .” She scratches that out-- too simplistic, The Traveller has lovingly marked up in the margins of her notebook “show--don’t tell!” when she’s described something too matter-of-factly. _ “His eyes are like the ocean I would look at from my window _ .” No, no, no that’s cliche  _ and _ inaccurate, Caleb’s eyes don’t look anything like the ocean, they’re much paler. _ “Like the water dripping off a cold glass in the summer.”  _ Too happy, she crosses that out. “ _ Like popsicles and blueberry taffy that are so blue, they stain my fingers and tongue _ .” Too sweet, not Caleb-like at all. “ _ His cerulean orbs…”  _ Uuuhg! Jester crosses that one out so vigorously that Beau peaks over her shoulder. 

“You alright there, Jessie?”

“It’s fiiiiine, don’t worry about it,” she grumbled, tearing out the whole page and crumbling it away.  After all of the scary things that have been happening lately, Jester has been all the more vigilant about her journaling to The Traveller, ensuring that no detail goes by unreported. Especially after her scare with a blue dragon, with how narrowly she and Nott had made it out alive… And with the loss of Molly while she and Fjord and Yasha were tied up in a basement... and all the terrible things that happened to Yasha before she knew them, and how Fjord lost Vandren, and how Beau’s family might be caught up in a war-- Nott’s family too!! And what about Caduceus’ family-- are they okay?? And Caleb… She doesn’t know what happened to Caleb but she knows it’s something bad. A lot of bad things seem to be happening to her friends since she’s gotten to know them. Good things too, but the bad have felt a little overwhelming lately. 

So Jester has taken it upon herself to describe everyone in great detail. She knows that The Traveller knows her and loves her and he’ll do what he can to protect her. But she just wants to make sure that he knows who her friends are, just in case he wants to protect them too. 

Fjord was maybe the easiest to describe: she’s known him the longest, after all. She described the way his green skin made her think of the underside of a boat tied up for too long. She wrote about his slowly budding tusks, how since they’ve started to get bigger, she’s noticed that he’s quicker to cover his mouth while he’s eating or when he yawns or laughs. An excellent keeper of secrets, but devoted to bare all to The Traveller, she wrote in Infernal about how she wished Fjord would use his real voice; how sad it made her to see him so insecure with his place in the world. She even drew a couple pictures of him where she got his face almost perfect (with the addition of two tusks peaking out of his pursed lips). Or well, the pictures always  _ started _ looking like Fjord-- the descriptions too-- but as she added more and more detail, her depictions gradually became conflated with images of the hunky half-orc Oscar. Ah,  _ Tusk Love _ , what a great book. “ _ Truly the defining novel of our generation _ ”, she scribbled in the margins, along with several cartoon hearts and tusked smiley faces. 

Beau was easy to write about too. Jester had spent a long time studying Beau’s features while she slept-- not in a creepy way, it was just the only time she seemed to be completely still for extended periods. Jester carefully cataloged all of Beau’s scrapes and scars and bruises. “Beau is like a banana right before it’s too ripe to eat,” she’d written to describe the constant smattering of superficial injuries that speckle across Beau’s skin after a fight. Jester also described the way Beau looked at her when they first met: kinda like she was a joke told at a funeral, one that Beau was trying very hard not to laugh at. Jester has enjoyed watching this resolve slowly fall away, the hardness and distance gradually softening into a warm, almost embarrassed smile. 

Nott was next. Nott maybe takes up most of her journal entries to The Traveller. A good 4 pages are dedicated to a catalog of codewords and secret plans like  _ Fluffernutter _ . There are transcripts of their good-cop-bad-cop routines, of how they expertly followed clues and closed cases. “ _ Nott thinks she is very ugly, but I think she is very cute,”  _ she began an entry dedicated to her physical appearance,  _ “ like a cute bat-cat thing… Caleb says her eyes are like tea saucers, but I think they’re more like little moons. At night, they reflect light like Cat-Frumpkin, and sometimes that’s a little scary, but I really don’t think she’s very creepy at all. I like how green she is. Not green like Fjord, though. I also think her hair is very pretty. I wish she thought so too, but she always thinks I’m just being nice when I say she’s cute. And I mean, I am being nice, because I am a very nice, but I also believe it.” _

Jester spent a good half-page just going on about how pink and soft and fluffy Caduceus’ hair is, and how much she likes the swirling patterns to the Wildmother on all his clothes. She doesn’t go too much into detail, though, because she doesn’t want The Traveller to get jealous or think she doesn’t find  _ his  _ holy symbol is the prettiest of them all. 

She also describes Yasha’s hair in excruciating detail, delighting in how it fades from dark to light.  _ “It’s like one of Nott’s treasure hoards, all full of beads and ribbons and small shiny things.” _

Descriptions of the whole group came so easily to her, so naturally for everyone, it seemed, but Caleb and his stupid blue eyes. It’s not even like eyes were hard to describe or anything. Nott’s eyes are like moons or saucers; Fjord’s are golden and slitted almost like a snake’s; unnervingly reminiscent to the strange orbs he brings his patron; Yasha’s are mismatched and stormy, each looking like the same sky on different days. Caleb’s are… what? 

“ _ The eyes are the windows to the soul, _ ” she begins, cringing inwardly at such a cliche beginning. What is it about Caleb that makes her feel like she needs to bring her metaphorical A-game? Maybe it’s all his books. Surely after reading as much as he does, he knows the difference between good and bad writing. She doesn’t want him to think she is a bad writer. Not like he’s ever going to read this or anything. She’s writing this for  _ The Traveller _ , that’s all. 

“ _ The eyes may be the windows to the soul, but Caleb’s eyes are more like doors,”  _ she amends. That’s a start.  _  “Sometimes, the doors open to windows. But more often than not, the doors just open to more doors or hallways that lead to nowhere. _ ” 

“ _ He’s like a shapeshifter. Not like Fjord is with his mask of many faces. He always looks like Caleb _ .  _ I can’t quite place how old he is... _ ” When they danced in Hupperdook or when she made him turn bright red from play-flirting and poking his ribs, he looked very young; jarred, inexperienced. But after a fight, he’ll look so old. The doors in his eyes lock tight, locking him inside. It could be a trick of the light: the fires he started cast dramatic shadows across his face, under and around his blue eyes, dramatic and icy against the warm light. He looks tired. The slump of his shoulders, his hands dangling at his sides, his whole form sagging like an unworn dress pulled out of a swamp. That same sagging coming on again and again, a weight put on by the simplest things. Like when they do something good and someone says they’re heroes, his eyes shut, his face saying “everyone but me.”

Jester hates it when he looks like that. But even worse is the way he looked that one time, underwater with Fjord in clouds of their intermingling blood. The red ichor in the black water, those blue eyes again, unblinking in the clouds of blood like the billows of smoke. That face when he looked at her then. And again, when Nott and she came out of the  _ happy ball of fun _ , and he just stared at them, holding those books. And then he went and locked himself in his room. Alone again, behind closed doors. He didn’t look old then. The look in his face made her think of the kids they helped in Hupperdook. Wide eyes, scared, lost. Ready to steal, and given time, maybe worse. He looked like a lost kid that wanted his parents. Maybe that’s the look he noticed on _ her _ face when he promised to bring her home...

But then he’d burn someone alive and say something like “I like the way fire feels.” Or that gravelly, feigned kindness when he said, “I’m very tired, but I’ll get to work if I have to…” 

A chill went down her spine and she almost dropped her pen. (At this point, Beau is used to Jester’s face journeys as she journals and knows better than to say anything about her concerned look.) She wasn’t  _ afraid  _ of Caleb, but when he did stuff like that, she felt afraid  _ for _ him. Her concern for him sits thick and heavy in her stomach. This kinda sick feeling has been a relatively new development. 

When she first met Caleb, her description was pretty straightforward. She spent a while returning to the way he smelled: like rotten eggs and dirt and sweat and something weird and acidic she couldn't quite place. Pale eyes, dirty brown-orangish hair that clumped together in filthy, almost dreaded strands; a scruffy beard that looked like the short wiry hair of a stray dog; his bandaged arms like sticks bundled together before throwing them into flame; his coat like a long-trampled carpet in a dive bar: rank and matted and full of dirt and spilled, stale alcohol.

But over time her descriptions of him have begun to shift and grow in complexity. He’s still tethered to that same, tattered coat, but she’s noticed he’s started to take better care of himself. His hair, while still long and a little wild, is more of a bright auburn than a dingy umber. Sometimes when freshly dried after a wash, it’s almost fluffy and it curls slightly at the ends: a dramatic change from the raggedy dirt-laden strings. He still has a distinctive scent, and while there’s still a slight hint of sulfur, Jester’s slowly recognized his smell as almost pleasant and somewhat comforting. The earthy smell she’d first noticed and attributed to dirt is actually the smell of the high-quality paper he hoards; the mysterious acidity is a combination of his arcane ink and the incense he uses to summon Frumpkin; under it all, there’s the ever-present backdrop of smoke and the dusty, oily smell of cat hair. 

She sighs and turns to a new page in her journal, attempting to draw him from memory. She starts with the eyes, like two gentle almonds and two bright blue splotches for the irises. But for some reason, she can’t bring herself to fill in the pupils. She leaves them like that: wide, blue, vacant, and fills around them with heavy, gestural lines that suggest movement and volume, trying to contrast the youth in their wideness with the aged lines that give the face weight. She then moves to his heavy eyebrows, the distinct curve of his Roman nose, his slightly square lips, and the full form of his bushy facial hair. She adds the many curves of his hair, capturing the slight fluff and curl, and filling it with the same vibrant orange she’d use to paint a campfire: maybe a bit of an embellishment, but she’s not going for realism, she’s trying to capture something essentially Calebish. 

As she draws the texture of his coat, she thinks of how it felt under her fingers when they waltzed. As she draws his bandaged hands, she considers how rough they felt as she held them when he first investigated the dodecahedron. The bandages themselves were like sandpaper, and his fingers were so black and ashen, they reminded her of the willow charcoal that she’d sometimes sketch with: small, willow twigs burnt so entirely into blackened stumps that they crumble in her hands and make heavy, black marks on the page. She takes some of this same charcoal from her bag to finish his hands, to add depth to his form, and to add a thin layer of dusty ash to all his features. She holds her drawing out in front of her, scrutinizing it. 

“Holy shit, Jester. That’s really good,” Beau interrupts, peaking over her shoulder, “Can you draw me?” 

“Hmmmm, maybe later. I still need to finish this one.” 

“Really? I mean, it looks just like Caleb. You are drawing Caleb, right?”

“Yeahhhh. I just feel like I can’t get the eyes right.” 

She stared at her work, gently smudging the charcoal on the page, feeling it lift off the page and onto her fingers. She looks down at the black smudging onto her blue fingertips, the lingering effects of fire staining the delicate blue of her skin. Sometimes, this is how she feels like Caleb looks at her. Like he’s this mess, like he’s going to tarnish her, like if he comes too close, his charcoal fingers are going to crumble into a black that swallows the blue. His blue eyes in the black water. Blue eyes in black smoke. She feels that sinking fear grow in her stomach again, but this time it’s combined with something else. Something warm, some light ache in her chest, not unlike how she felt while reading about Oscar carrying Guinivere across the field, but different. More complicated; tinged with sadness and worry and a deep, aching _ care _ . 

She thinks of how he looked at her when he first let her into his tiny hut, and they were freshly rescued from The Iron Shepherds. That small smile she worked so hard to put across his features with her jokes and pranks. All her smiling and dancing and teasing Fjord about extended eye contact and sleeping shoulder to shoulder: her devotion to being a delightful seed of joy and chaos, even as her lungs felt full of water her heart felt like a balloon filled too full of air, all tight and ready to pop and bleed. And there was Caleb, pulling her into his hut, almost letting her into whatever place he goes, sharing this prank to cheer her up. The way he looked at her, not like he was going to tarnish her, but like he already knew that what had happened had changed her, roughened her up and hardened the parts of her she’d tried so hard to keep soft. 

And when she was singing in the cold, and he offered her his coat, almost as if giving her permission to feel cold. And again, when he asked her how she felt about Fjord, how she _ really _ felt about him, when Beau and Nott were writing the queasy, looping, biting jealousy that sat in her gut as a silly crush, as a joke, as a quirk (which, granted, was how she was trying to play it off). How he asked how she felt, _ really felt _ , about everything. And how when Fjord told her he would get her home, it felt like an apology, but when Caleb said it, it felt like a promise. 

She returns to his eyes, adding small flecks of amber and black to the vacant blue: the reflection of whatever fire he watching. She draws next to her portrait a small symbol of The Traveller: an opening doorway with a path leading inward or outward.  A promise. 


End file.
